Like many organisations, Stanley said Flight Centre was faced with overcoming many digital marketing challenges such as:

The consultant is the keeper of customer knowledge

Staff capability and skills

Siloed structures

Fragmented processes

Inability to embrace culture and innovation – ‘we always did it this way’

Fragmented strategic architecture

Lack of prioritisation

Sales recorded by supplier and amount only

Product marketed online are different to the ones marketed instore

Phone sales were handed in the physical stores

Low mobile and tablet technology adaptation

Website was designed to encourage customers to visit a consultant

“One of the problems Flight Centre had was that it didn’t know who its customers were,” Stanley said. “It didn’t know what products it had, especially as many bookings were done directly with suppliers. And while it knew how many consultants it had and how much to pay them, it didn’t know what specific skills they had and how to better match the right consultant with the right customer and the right product.”

Added to this, about 40 per cent of Flight Centre’s consultants in physical stores had been with the organisation less than a year and were relatively inexperienced.

“One of the challenges with that is they don’t have the supporting data and technologies to better support them,” he said.

The path towards customer centricity

In order to be more customer centric, Komosion said Flight Centre initially embarked on a customer journey project to first try and understand the customer.

“That was necessary before trying to shift the Flight Centre dynamic from a consultant-based product driven company to a more customer minded company,” he said.

Through the customer journey mapping process, Komosion said various touchpoints were identified. “Things like customers like to browse online before going in-store, and all those who go in-store like to then check things out online,” he said. “That really helped us frame the omni-channel approach to take.

“We then discovered the need and behaviours of Flight Centre’s customers. Flight Centre as a travel group owns a number of different brands, so we needed to look at which brand was the right fit for each customer under which circumstance.”

Based on these insights, Stanley said Komosion made internal changes, putting the right people with the right skillsets where they would be needed the most.

“When you do this kind of change, it really needs to be run as one massive, cohesive project but with ownership within the operational businesses,” he commented.

One of the biggest changes was adopting an overarching approach to marketing spend and resources to drive enquiry, and re-shifting the marketing function to look after engagement, attract new customers and convert existing ones.

“It was a three-year plan, so when you undergo this kind of change, don’t think it’s going to happen in five minutes,” Stanley said.

According to Julien, Flight Centre now has a clear business strategy translated into predictive, data-based tools marketers can use.

“Predictive intelligence is a bit of a buzzword, but underlying it is truly understanding the customer journey,” he said. “But if you don’t have the right senses out there and collect the data and use it in an organised fashion, you’re dead in the water.”

Julien said the journey of overhauling Flight Centre’s data systems was a ground up approach. “We wanted to look at the deeper insights and rethink and restructure our business goals,” he said. “That’s been a large part of the change.

“We’re still going through a large transformative change with our data, our CRM space and our sales and marketing space. That’s how we can service our customers better across all the different channels.”

“By centralising our information and our data, we can now centralise our media buying,” Julien explained. “It’s about getting the technology together to ensure we get a good grip on how much time and resources we need to spend on which customer.

“I think we still have a lot of work to do and we still have a lot of energy to put into this space, but it all starts with getting our data and product strategies right.”

For Stanley, a digital strategy ultimately needs to be central and seamlessly integrate both online and offline.

“Flight Centre finds customers buy the experience, not the commodity of travel,” he said. “On top of this, the customer must be managed by the whole organisation, not just the consultant. While our consultants are Flight Centre’s competitive advantage, digital is the only way to support and ensure a consistent and seamless service.

“Of course the change of an organisation is the biggest of all challenges, and this takes time.”

Blog Posts

Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, announced the death of customer segmentation five years ago saying, "The shift is to go from the segment to the individual. She might have been a bit premature for most marketers, but if customer segmentation isn't dead yet, it's definitely on life support.

Andrew Ehrenberg was a giant in the field of marketing science. He believed scientific methods could reveal law-like patterns of how people buy. In this post, I summarise one of Ehrenberg’s most important discoveries and its implications on how people buy brands.

The purpose of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always been to replace the menial and repetitive tasks we do each day in every sector, so that we can concentrate on doing what we do best. Saving time and money has certainly been a decent outcome as AI infiltrates the business landscape, however, now we are starting to see problems that cause major issues in practice.

Latest Podcast

In this bonus last episode of this new podcast series, BrandHook MD, Pip Stocks, talks with former ANZ group general manager of marketing, Louise Eyres, talks about the importance of thinking like a customer and using intuition to solve customer painpoints.

Sign in

About us | Contact us | Privacy Policy | RSS
Copyright 2018 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.